Renowned American artist Tara Donovan (born 1969) creates sculptural objects of enigmatic beauty by utilizing and experimenting with simple, everyday objects such as Scotch tape, drinking straws, paper plates, needles, plastic rods, toothpicks, mylar and buttons. At first these abstract objects resemble enlarged cellular structures, or living organisms from the depths of the ocean. "What I'm striving for is to be an alchemist and transcend the material," Donovan says. "It's more of a mimicking of the way of nature, the way things actually grow." Her method is also allied to an American Minimalist sculptural tradition that includes artists such as Sol LeWitt, Robert Irwin and James Turrell. This volume, with its handsome mirror-paper cover and debossing, presents eight works made between 2004 and 2012, as installed at the Arp Museum in Germany and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark.

Tara Donovan's sculptures and installations are mind-bending experiences: she transforms common everyday materials like straws and index cards turning them into elaborate, room-size sculptures that are as surreal as they are beautiful MacArthur "genius" grant recipient Tara Donovan's otherworldly sculptures have transfixed audiences for over a decade. Taking mundane materials and through clever craftsmanship, ingenuity, and repeated manipulation, the artist builds large-scale works made of rubber bands, plastic tubing, and paper plates into objects that evoke the natural world or other organic material. This volume--which accompanies a major exhibition at MCA Denver--features an expansive selection of her most significant works to date, including sculpture, drawings, works on paper, and site-responsive installations. This exhibition will be the first time that Donovan's wall-based and freestanding objects will be installed together, in order to understand fully how the artist conceptualizes her complex work. Curator Nora Burnett Abrams, along with two other leading scholars of contemporary art Jenni Sorkin and Guiliana Bruno, consider critical issues around her work: ideas related to labor, scale, process and formalism, among other key themes. The book looks at several major bodies of work realized in different formats and different settings, affording the reader a glimpse into the important themes and visual languages the artist continuously explores.

Known for her commitment to process, Tara Donovan has earned acclaim for her ability to discover the inherent physical characteristics of an object and transform it into art. Extending upon the artist's core interest in investigating aggregative procedures using a singular material, the recent series is comprised of wall-mounted framed works in various sizes that explore stratification as both a sculptural technique and a means to construct a two-dimensional picture plane.00Exhibition: Pace Gallery, London, UK (24.01.-09.03.2018).

An argument for the centrality of the visual culture of waste—as seen in works by international contemporary artists—to the study of our ecological condition. Ecological crisis has driven contemporary artists to engage with waste in its most non-biodegradable forms: plastics, e-waste, toxic waste, garbage hermetically sealed in landfills. In this provocative and original book, Amanda Boetzkes links the increasing visualization of waste in contemporary art to the rise of the global oil economy and the emergence of ecological thinking. Often, when art is analyzed in relation to the political, scientific, or ecological climate, it is considered merely illustrative. Boetzkes argues that art is constitutive of an ecological consciousness, not simply an extension of it. The visual culture of waste is central to the study of the ecological condition. Boetzkes examines a series of works by an international roster of celebrated artists, including Thomas Hirschhorn, Francis Alÿs, Song Dong, Tara Donovan, Agnès Varda, Gabriel Orozco, and Mel Chin, among others, mapping waste art from its modernist origins to the development of a new waste imaginary generated by contemporary artists. Boetzkes argues that these artists do not offer a predictable or facile critique of consumer culture. Bearing this in mind, she explores the ambivalent relationship between waste (both aestheticized and reviled) and a global economic regime that curbs energy expenditure while promoting profitable forms of resource consumption.

What was your earliest childhood artwork that received recognition? When did you first consider yourself a professional artist? How has your studio's location influenced your work? How do you choose titles? Do you have a favorite color? Joe Fig asked a wide range of celebrated artists these and many other questions during the illuminating studio visits documented in Inside the Artist's Studio—the follow-up to his acclaimed 2009 book, Inside the Painter's Studio. In this remarkable collection, twenty-four painters, video and mixed-media artists, sculptors, and photographers reveal highly idiosyncratic production tools and techniques, as well as quotidian habits and strategies for getting work done: the music they listen to; the hours they keep; and the relationships with gallerists and curators, friends, family, and fellow artists that sustain them outside the studio.

On the history of a pioneering installation-art space Long before it became commonplace, Rice Gallery was one of a handful of spaces in the US devoted to commissioning site-specific installation art. This book documents works by artists including El Anatsui, Shigeru Ban, Tara Donovan, Nicole Eisenman, Yayoi Kusama, Sol LeWitt and Judy Pfaff.